Free Culture Trust

Our Mission

The Free Culture Trust will receive and hold copyright bequests
from artists who want assurance of unfettered public access to
their works. The organization will use the copyrights to:

Ensure the work remains available under free licensing

Ensure attribution requirements are met

Share share-alike requirements for derivative works are met

Protect the work against censorship and copyfraud (e.g., mistaken
YouTube takedowns and other retroactive restrictions both
malicious and accidental)

Provide a clear registry so the public (including artists
considering making derivatives) can be assured that the work is
available under free license; Handle relicensing if/when better
licenses (or versions of licenses) become available in the future

Ensure the persistence of Internet domains associated with the
work

This is not just for estates. It is also a way for living
artists to "opt out" of restrictive copyright easily, and not
have to deal with the hassle of policing their copyrights,
registering them for maximum legal protection, answering
questions about rights, etc.

The organization will provide legal templates to make this
process easy with boilerplate language for copyright assignment
by a living artist as well as copyright assignment as part of an
artist's estate and for fiscal contributions along with their
work (especially when it's part of an estate).

The organization will also work with publishers and other
distributors so that they do not impose long-term restrictions on
where the copyright ends up or what can be done with it. In
addition, FCT will provide language for contracts with publishers
that offers various gradations of "free": time-delayed free
licensing, conditionalized free-licensing, liberation prices, etc.